Chapter Text
The problem quickly arising on the houseboat was that Echo and Six had no idea where they were going. They’d both been in the Pale City, but Six hadn’t left by choice, and Echo… Six didn’t know how Echo had gotten to the lighthouse.
When was the appropriate point to ask people about their past? Rooting through your temporary home for navigation equipment didn’t sound like a bad time. So Six asked.
Echo sat back on her heels and regarded Six.
“You don’t have to tell me,” Six said quickly.
“I don’t remember.”
“Okay.”
“I remember… static. That’s it.” Echo looked unhappy.
Static…
“Did a television eat you?” Six asked.
“What?”
“Probably not, then.”
“Have you been eaten by a television?”
“Yes.”
Echo went back to her searching. After a moment she pulled out a circular metal object. It had glass atop it, and from where it sat on top of Echo’s palm Six could see a tiny arrow settling to point towards a tiny letter. There were several tiny letters inscribed around the edges. She got closer.
“What does it say?” Six asked, her nose almost touching the glass.
“It doesn’t say anything.”
“But it has letters on it.”
“It’s a compass, the letters stand for the four different directions,” Echo explained.
“There’s more than four directions.”
This was making Six feel stupid. She did not like feeling stupid.
“Yeah, that’s what these notches are for.”
Echo pointed out the tiny markings between the letters and started explaining how the compass only pointed one direction. She explained other things as well, but at this point Six was well and truly lost. But Echo seemed to be enjoying talking about this compass thing, so she didn’t want to interrupt.
“How do you know all these things?” Six asked when Echo fell silent.
“Nosebleed.”
“Nosebleed knew a lot, huh?”
Echo nodded. “She taught me so much. I used to be angry that she knew so much more than me. It felt unfair. Like, how come she got to have a life where she knew things other than just surviving? She got to read, and know about directions, and how to cook…”
“I never met anyone who could do those things,” Six said, “Except you.”
Echo fidgeted awkwardly with the compass.
“She found me caught in a trap. My arm was all mangled. She saved me, took care of me while my arm healed. We had a lot of time to just talk. She made me stew and taught me how to read. But my arm didn’t heal right. It started to smell.”
“Smell?”
“Yeah.” Echo fumbled and dropped the compass. It made a louder noise than Six expected, and for a horrible moment she thought it was broken.
Carefully, Echo picked it up again. It seemed to be just fine - as far as Six could tell.
“We traveled from the woods where this scary hunter lived - he was the one who put up the traps - and we made our way into the city. We found a hospital. There were these hands, and mannequins…”
“I remember those,” Six said quickly. “The hands. And the hunter. Not the mannequins, but Mono told me about them.”
Echo laughed. “Guess we just missed each other.”
“I guess.”
“Maybe things would have been different if there had been more of us.”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe…” Echo stared at the compass again, shifting it this way and that.
“And then Nosebleed chopped off your arm?” Six prompted.
Echo didn’t move.
“Echo?”
“We should head east.” She was scowling at the device, as if it were telling her things she didn’t want to hear.
“Which way is that?”
Echo pointed.
Six scrambled into the seat, started up the engine, and gave the wheel a huge twist with all her might. The boat turned, and slowly - with a great creaking - they were headed towards the east.
When the boat steadied, Six sat back down next to Echo.
“Nosebleed told me about a place that isn’t like everywhere else,” Echo whispered.
“How you mean?”
“Somewhere safe.”
“Nowhere’s safe.”
“That’s where she came from. This place she talked about. When my arm was healed she was going to take me there. We were going to find the way back.”
“Do you think we could find it?” Six suggested.
“Not without her.” Echo put the compass in her nightshirt pocket and stood up. “Shall we make some breakfast?”
Six’s stomach gave a definite yes.
||
Six awoke in a world of nothing. Her heart began ramming against her chest, trying to escape. Her breath came in gasps, but she couldn’t feel the air in her lungs. There was light, but it wasn’t right. It didn’t illuminate anything. There wasn’t anything to illuminate. She stood up but couldn’t feel the floor beneath her. She tried to walk, but it didn’t feel like she was moving.
Where was she? Where was Echo?
“Hey!” the word reverberated back into her mouth. It tasted stale on her tongue.
She fumbled in her jacket pocket – when had she put it on? – for her lighter and clicked it on. In the weak light of the flame, she saw Echo’s ghostly form. But it was wrong, somehow. Something was more wrong than the way her form flickered in and out of reality. Her arm – Six gasped as she realized it. Normally, Echo only had her left arm, but in front of her now she only had her right. That… couldn’t be right, could it?
“Echo?” Six tried, reaching out her empty hand to her friend.
The words rippled the air, but they didn’t seem to reach her. Her friend’s sheet swayed in a breeze Six couldn’t feel, her eyes fixed on a point somewhere beyond Six. What was she seeing? Six turned to look and felt her legs turn to stone.
In the light she cast she could see Evelyn. Hood back, eyes wide, wandering the empty landscape. Close and endlessly far away. Tangible and transparent. Where were they?
“Evelyn!” Six called.
Once again, her words went no further than her nose.
Six wanted to scream. Her movement felt sluggish as she twisted on the spot. As her light fell across the darkness, she saw others. Other ghostly figures. Were they all dead, like Evelyn? She didn’t know them. Not like she knew Evelyn and Echo. No… wait there was another she could see. A boy in blue…
A hand grabbed her, but she couldn’t see it.
Cold. Cold air in her lungs. Six struggled out of the blankets she and Echo had bundled onto the bed – all salvaged from the ruined town they had left two days ago now. The moon still cast blue light through the thick windows of the houseboat. She was still dressed in the soft shirt she was using as sleep clothes, and Echo, who was stirring too, was dressed the same.
Six hugged her knees to her chest, waiting for Echo to wake.
“What did you see?” came her friend’s muffled voice.
Echo hadn’t fully sat up yet.
“They’re all dead,” Six whispered, “Where are they?”
“I don’t know,” Echo replied, drawing the blankets tighter around herself as she scooted away from Six.
“How could we see them?” Six wanted to move closer to Echo, but that seemed like a bad idea given how pointedly Echo wasn’t looking at her.
Echo began chewing the skin of her thumb.
A foul taste infected Six’s mouth. “Did I do something?”
“No.” Echo shook her head.
“How do you know?”
“Because I did it.”
Oh. Six fisted her hands in the blanket, pressing her knuckles rhythmically into the mattress. It was soothing. It distracted from the blood welling along Echo’s nailbed.
“I didn’t mean to,” Echo whispered. Now she was pressing another finger against the open sore in her thumb. “I didn’t mean to take you with me. It’s not safe for you there.”
“Where?”
“Between.”
“Between what?”
“No, it is Between. Between life and death,” Echo explained. “I call it the Between.”
“Oh,” Six said like she understood.
“I can touch… death.”
Echo’s thumb was dripping blood on to the blankets. Six reached out and closed her hand around the offending finger, shutting off the tap.
“We touch a lot of dead things,” she supplied, helpfully.
“Not dead things. Death.” Echo’s eyes were twitching, her focus scattered.
Six squeezed her finger.
“Ow.”
“Sorry.” Six let go.
“After I lost my arm, I could… do things. I could reach out with it, the missing one, and…” Echo trailed off, fiddling with thin air.
Six settled in slightly closer to her friend and tried out what she thought might be an understanding expression. It felt… weird. It pulled at her lips and made her cheeks sore.
“You died.”
The words didn’t quite make it through Six’s ears.
“What?”
“You died. When you fell in the river. You drowned.”
There was a gentle splat as a tear rolled off Echo’s cheek and onto the blankets.
“But I’m here.”
“When I pulled you out, you’d gone cold. I, I reached into you with my other hand and… brought you back. I’d done it before with, with mice. With rats.” Echo brought her hand up to start biting at her skin again.
Six pressed her hand against her own chest, feeling the erratic, constant rhythm beating away beneath her flesh and bones. Alive. She remembered how dark everything had gone. How everything had become nothing. How she’d been wrapped up in Echo’s sheet… how Echo had left her alone, how she’d started a fire and taken her coat.
“You didn’t think it worked.”
“I didn’t know I could do it with people.”
There was blood smeared on Echo’s chin.
“Why?”
“What?”
“Why,” Six repeated.
“I just didn’t want you to die. I didn’t want you to be dead.” Echo’s hand fell limp against the bed.
It was eerie, the way light reflected in Echo’s eyes. The pale, luminescent green. Like a warning. Like something not right. Perhaps what Six liked best about Echo was her eyes. She slid her hand across the space between them and offered her pinky.
Echo took it.
“What about the others?” Six asked.
“I can’t get to them. I can’t… help them.”
“Do you want to?”
“I… don’t know.”
“You don’t, you don’t have to.”
Echo squeezed Six’s pinky.
“I won’t go there again. Not while you’re next to me,” she promised.
Six squeezed back. “Thanks.”
They sat there, silent, for a time before Six spoke again.
“You were looking for her.”
Echo didn’t reply.
“You were looking for Nosebleed.”
A nod, stiff and more reflexive than anything else.
“Did you find her?”
Echo hadn’t been moving, but she went still. The kind that Six saw in rabbits and mice and small lizards. With perhaps the most deliberation she had ever put into anything, Six moved closer to her now trembling friend, letting go of her pinky and wrapping her arms around her wholly instead.
She was all bone and taught muscle in the same ways Six was, only minus an arm. They were brittle – not in a breakable way, but in the way that knives are. Echo sniffed, wetly, before pushing her face into Six’s shoulder and relaxing into her. Six, for her part, waited until she wrapped her arm around her in return before squeezing her little ghost tightly too her.
They held each other like that for a long time; holding on like maybe if they didn’t let go the world would be just a little bit better. Maybe they could stay in this world where it was okay to cry, to bleed, to dribble snot down your friend’s shirt. Maybe it would all be okay. Maybe the nightmares wouldn’t last forever.
When their breathing steadied and they’d finished crying, the weight of the salt on their eyes turned to exhaustion and it felt like their flesh was going to slough off their bones. Six crawled under the blankets and lifted them up to allow Echo to do the same. This time, for the first time, they stayed close beneath the warm weight.
Echo released a fractured breath before turning and resting her head on Six’s chest.
“Good?” Six whispered.
“Mmm.”
Six let her hand drift up to play with Echo’s long hair. It had gotten knotted again since their shower. Maybe they should do that again, since it wasn’t like it was going anywhere. How often were you supposed to clean yourself? Surely it couldn’t be every few days. Perhaps it was just when you reached a certain level of grime that you were supposed to wash yourself? But that warm water was so nice…
“I didn’t find her.”
Echo’s whispered words stuck to the air around them.
“Is that good?”
“I don’t know.”
“Does it mean she’s alive?”
“I don’t know.”
Maybe… “Did you see -”
“I don’t know what he looks like.”
“I saw Evelyn,” Six mumbled into Echo’s hair. “I saw a boy from the Maw. I never knew his name. If he had one.”
“You can get lost there. I’ve gotten lost.”
“How do you get back?”
Echo propped herself up slightly. “Sometimes I don’t.”
“Don’t leave me.”
The words were out before Six thought them.
“I won’t,” Echo said softly.
Six held out her pinky. With a sigh, Echo laid back down and extracted her arm.
Mono lay on the cold concrete, his breath nearly as loud in Six’s ears as the roar of the incinerator. The Doctor had stopped screaming now, and soon the flames would die down. But for now, it was warm in front of that terrible machine. She wished she hadn’t tossed in that wooden duck. She wouldn’t have been able to take it with her, but it would have been nice to know it was still around. Still… not alive, but existing. Unchanged.
“That was, I… not good.” Mono settled beside her.
“Mmmh.”
“I didn’t think… I’m glad you had a plan.”
“Mmmhmm.”
“You wouldn’t have, right?”
Six didn’t look at him.
“If I hadn’t.”
The bright light was dying. It would be cold again soon. Like the concrete.
“You would have waited.”
“Yeah.”
“Promise?”
“I promise,” Echo said, taking Six’s pinky in her own.
“Promise.”